We are very happy to announce the availability of Azure Marketplace solutions to run IBM WebSphere Liberty and Open Liberty on Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO) and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). The solutions are jointly developed and supported by IBM and Microsoft. The solutions make it as easy as possible to move Liberty workloads to ARO or AKS by automating most boilerplate provisioning tasks. Evaluate the Liberty on ARO and Liberty on AKS solutions for full production usage and reach out to collaborate on migration cases.
Solution Details
The Marketplace solutions enable you to focus on developing and deploying your containerized applications instead of initial provisioning and configuration of Java and Azure resources. The resources automatically provisioned by the Liberty on ARO solution include virtual networks, an ARO cluster, the OpenShift Container Registry (OCR), and the Liberty Operator. A secure OpenShift namespace is set up to contain your application. Similarly, the Liberty on AKS solution provisions an Azure Container Registry (ACR) instance, an AKS cluster and the Liberty Operator. The solutions can optionally deploy a container (e.g., Docker) image including Open Liberty or WebSphere Liberty and your application.
IBM and Microsoft also provide basic step-by-step guidance on getting started with Liberty and ARO or Liberty and AKS. The guidance is suitable for customers that wish to remain as close as possible to a native OpenShift or Kubernetes manual deployment experience. In addition, IBM and Microsoft provide a Marketplace solution to run a traditional WebSphere Application Server cluster on Azure Virtual Machines.
The solutions enable a wide range of production-ready deployment architectures with relative ease. After the initial provisioning is done, you have complete flexibility to further customize your deployments. For example, in ARO you have access to the variety OpenShift capabilities, and additionally, you can take advantage of a range of Azure resources for extra functionality.
The solutions are Bring-Your-Own-License. They assume you have sufficient entitlements for your use of Liberty on Azure. WebSphere Liberty is available as a limited Trial option before entitlement is required. Open Liberty is open source and free to use unsupported. You can also use Open Liberty supported through WebSphere Liberty entitlements. When using WebSphere Liberty or Open Liberty supported, usage should be tracked using the License Service Operator.
Get started with Liberty on ARO and AKS
Explore the solutions for Liberty on ARO and Liberty on AKS, provide feedback, and stay informed of the roadmap. You can also take advantage of hands-on help from the engineering team behind these solutions. The opportunity to collaborate on a migration scenario is completely free while the solutions are under active initial development.
